Dinner With Schmucks

The president is having some congressional Republicans over for dinner again so that he can conduct another seance for the purposes of getting their political souls to rise from the dead. These people can be absolutely adorable, I tell you.

A White House spokeswoman said Obama would attend the dinner. The April 10 dinner will include a dozen GOP members invited by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), Republican aides said Wednesday. The location is yet to be determined. In an interview with POLITICO, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised the president's outreach efforts."I told him ... those small dinners were a good thing and he could go have all the members down, including the people who are the least likely to be inclined to do anything," McConnell said.

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Isakson, apparently, has been giving the president the impression that he may be the new leader of the Not Entirely Insane wing of his party's congressional caucus, a position that has been open since Richard Lugar failed his annual carbon-14 dating test and was retired to an Indiana tree farm. And it's hard not not to throw at least a mild golf-clap at a man who once said of Princess Dumbass Of The Northwoods:

I have no idea. I understand — and you have to check this out — I just had a phone call where someone said Sarah Palin's web site had talked about the House bill having death panels on it where people would be euthanized. How someone could take an end of life directive or a living will as that is nuts. You're putting the authority in the individual rather than the government. I don't know how that got so mixed up.

The problem, of course, remains that the president is dealing with a Republican party in which Johnny Isakson is now a "moderate." That is his problem. Our problem is that the conversation over dinner is almost guaranteed to center completely on the proposition, "How much pain ahould we inflict on people who are not us?" The fact that the American economy has almost completely surrendered to corporate oligarchy is not likely to come up.

Newly released data on corporate profitability for 2012 show the continuation of historic levels of profitability despite excessive unemployment and stagnant wages for most workers. Specifically, the share of capital income (such as profits and interest, which are hereafter referred to as 'profits') in the corporate sector increased to 25.6 percent in 2012, the highest in any year since 1950-1951 and far higher than the 19.9 percent share prevailing over 1969-2007, the five business cycles preceding the financial crisis... Profitability used to be lower when there was high unemployment, but in this downturn we have already seen the share of income going to profit exceed the high point reached in the last recovery or at any time in the last five recoveries. We now have an economy built to assure high corporate profitability even when it's operating far below capacity and when most families and workers are faring poorly.

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Too often, the economic problems of this country are sold to its citizens as being far too complex for them to understand and, therefore, by clear implication, too complex for political democracy to handle. And the hell of it all is that most people are completely aware that this is happening to them. They see it in their own lives. It's not as though the foreclosures, and the looted pensions, and the food-or-medicine decisions are happening in some Phantom Zone to other people.

What's worse is that this is not being done by stealth, or by sharp practice, though sharp practices there are. It is being done deliberately and people are being encouraged by their government and by the courtier political media — and by the utterly corrupt financial media, especially on television — that their stagnant wages and the yawning gap in income inequality are both symptoms that the economy is getting better. A viable democracy is not sustainable within the economic model, and subject to the economic forces, that are prevailing now in our politics. Sooner or later, something's going to blow. People are being asked to ignore the circumstances that are grinding them down, day by day, and being told that their economic pain is really for their own good. Who are you going to believe, after all, Maria Bartiromo or your own lying eyes?

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